Tracking the wild ponies of Little Horse Island

For 17 years, Wayne Webb followed a strict, but not necessarily strenuous, morning routine.

He awoke at 6 a.m., made a cup of coffee -- sometimes tea -- and strolled out onto his deck.

Webb's home is on a small island, no more than 10 acres, just off St. Helena Island. It is surrounded by a maze of interwoven creeks that would take a salty sailor to navigate. A slight breeze usually sways the marsh grass and spritzes the air with the aroma of low tide and pluff mud.

While vivid and consuming, the view is not what he's there for.

He's waiting for the brown smudges to appear on the horizon. If he waits long enough, those smudges wander into focus and become marsh ponies.

There were four of them when Webb first moved to Little Horse Island in the 1990s, he said. Now 15 roam the appropriately named island.

"It was absolutely incredible, to just get up every day, and the first thing you do is walk out to the back porch to see what the ponies are doing," said Webb, whose family recently sold the property and moved to Port Royal.

"I think that the area is absolutely beautiful without them, but there are a lot of places like it around the world," he continued. "But there is no place this special, and these ponies are what make it something special. They give this area something that I've never seen anywhere else in the world."

The wild ponies have called the island home since the 1950s, long before the Webbs arrived. Those lucky enough to see the blend of marsh tacky horses and Shetland ponies hope they will be there for a long time.

But the ponies face several threats -- a limited food source, inbreeding and encroaching development, among them -- that put that future at risk, according to retired equestrian veterinarian Venaye Reece McGlashan, who moved to St. Helena several years ago.

Such concerns and recent events -- a pony was struck and killed by a car last month when it wandered from the marsh -- have spurred the community to act.

Unwilling to accept a Little Horse Island without the little horses, groups are working to protect and preserve this uniquely Beaufort County treasure.

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This story was originally published November 23, 2014 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Tracking the wild ponies of Little Horse Island."